Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday January 27, 2012 @04:29PM
from the chunk-of-change dept.

redletterdave writes "Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates pledged $750 million to the troubled global AIDS fund on Thursday and urged governments to continue their support to save lives. Since the fund was launched 10 years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $1.4 billion to the charity, having already contributed $650 million prior to the latest donation. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria accounts for around a quarter of international financing to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria."

Even the general Slashdot feeling towards Microsoft, it is true that his (and Melinda's) work is great. Let's hope he keeps it up!

Well, I have an issue with this. From the article:

While that will give an immediate boost, more is needed from governments, which have provided the bulk of the $22.6 billion that has been raised by the Geneva-based organization to date for its work in 150 countries.

The commitment of governments was shaken last year when the fund reported "grave misuse of funds" in four recipient nations, prompting some donors such as Germany and Sweden to freeze their donations.

Why do coutnries pay into this foundation that invests primarily in American funds and stocks [buzzflash.com]? Why do they not setup their own charities that invest in their own stocks or -- better yet -- give it directly to the institutions of medical research?

This perplexes me to no end. This foundation is at the mercy of the stock market and rely on money managers to post returns every year so that it can give those returns to the targeted countries and research

Buying stock does not cause ANY money to be put 'in the companies coffers', unless it is newly issued stock (which is rare). Whoever owned the stock before you has the money. You, in turn, have an asset that will hopefully earn you more than you paid for it, over time. That worth could be realized as income from dividends or from sale of the stock at a higher price than you paid.

Germany buying stock in a German company in no way helps the company, so what is the point of doing it?

Why do other countries contribute to the foundation? Because they trust that the money will be managed and spent wisely. Could they do the same things themselves? Of course - but what makes you think they would do any better managing or spending the money?

Do they NEED to invest the money? Of course not - they could keep it in the proverbial vault and dole it out to orgs as needed. However, that would GUARANTEE that the money will eventually run out. With well-managed money you can theoretically continue handing out money forever.

Having worked on Grants funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation I can tell you that no other large philanthropic organization is as involved and concerned about how the money they give is used and asking to see direct evidence and holding the parties accountable for outcomes. They are perfectly OK with not re-funding any effort that hasn't made the progress they expected to see based on the funds they provided. They also use external auditors and processes to ensure that the grant recipients are n

And how much did you give to charity, exactly? The Gates foundation is extremely focused on making sure the money it spends produces real results in helping people. If you did give money to charity, did you do the same? Do you think a child receiving a malaria vaccination gives half a shit where it was made? Have you ever done anything worthwhile in your entire life?

While that will give an immediate boost, more is needed from governments, which have provided the bulk of the $22.6 billion that has been raised by the Geneva-based organization to date for its work in 150 countries.

The commitment of governments was shaken last year when the fund reported "grave misuse of funds" in four recipient nations, prompting some donors such as Germany and Sweden to freeze their donations.

Why do coutnries pay into this foundation that invests primarily in American funds and stocks [buzzflash.com]? Why do they not setup their own charities that invest in their own stocks or -- better yet -- give it directly to the institutions of medical research?

This perplexes me to no end. This foundation is at the mercy of the stock market and rely on money managers to post returns every year so that it can give those returns to the targeted countries and research -- right up until a crisis causes those funds to greatly shrink.

I have complained about this before [slashdot.org] and been called "full of bullshit [slashdot.org]" and I guess this is just one thing that my opinion and concern diverges on from the rest of the readers here. This is charity in the form of keeping the capital inside America's border and shaving off returns. The money stays at work in America and no such stock or company or infrastructure is built up in the countries that could truly use it and truly need it.

When you're talking billions of dollars, you're talking enough money to start internal institutions and programs that could create jobs or better education as well as do medical research. Instead this money stays in the coffers of rich Western companies and even after the returns are "given" to the countries, it is given in the form of purchased medicines often made by American companies. And that strategy of deciding where your donations gets spent doesn't always work out [slashdot.org] like you would expect.

It's great he donates all that money but that method is never going to change anything. The real winners here are the companies that get huge cash infusions from the foundation in the form of investment (like Monsanto) and Big Pharma who gets the revenue from all the AIDS medicine that is bought and shipped. Exactly why are foreign governments investing in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation instead of finding a better solution?

Bring on the "look a gift horse in the mouth" posts. They may be right but there has to be a better way to use this money to accomplish these goals. It's almost designed to be a perpetual medicine exporting machine.

You are mixing up two things here. There's the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and there's the Global Aids Fund.

Bill Gates just donated money to the latter, which depends on donations from individual countries, is run out of Geneva (not by the Gates foundation) and has criticized for being poorly managed.

The Gate Foundation invested in Monsanto, which is the link you provided, not the Global Aids fund. I'm not aware of foreign countries investing in the Gates Foundation.

As unsavory as it might be for charities to be using donated money to invest, the purpose here is long-term viability. The purpose of the Gates Foundation is to fund things that might not show tangible results for decades that traditional, government-directed research and public health funds cannot address. This type of planning is pointless if you can't guarantee the Gates fund will be able to sustain funding for such projects on a decade timescale, which is simply not possible without some sort of long term financial investing. It would be nice if the inves

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation doesn't lie about how they're spending money, unlike many charities. They also are managed in an intelligent way--intelligent enough that two of the most successful men in the world have donated the bulk of their wealth to it. Contributing to antimalarial work, for example, makes an incredible difference in the lives of millions of people. In the developed world we tend to think of people as ill or not ill; in develo

The point is to setup a trust that can't be taxed out of existence. When you die, and you try to leave a bunch of money to someone, the government, in America, takes a very large portion of it in taxes (your legacy dies off quickly with you). To curtail this you have to use a trust. Billionaires are control freaks and they want to direct their money from the grave--trusts allow them to do that. The trust is a "non-profit" that can live on under a charter that must be adhered to by the web (check and balanc

I'm pretty sure all charities are "tax shelters". Where does the scam part come in? Is his $750M is fake? Is he publicly donating $750M while secretly siphoning off huge chunks of cash and putting it in his own pocket? Or do you just not like Bill Gates and therefore you wanted to point out that his foundation can't really compete with the budget of the U.S. Government?

Charity is Charity – If you earn money and give it away you are not taxed on the money given.

Tax Shelters are used to delay or avoid taxes. If somebody had a large bonus this year (ordinary income) one would try to build a tax shelter to convert it to long term capital gains. i.e., don’t pay the tax this year, pay the lower capital gains tax after a couple of years.

Alpaca farms are a great example. It’s a part time gig, and all of a sudden your large SUV and barn (for your riding horses) c

In this case, it sounds like he's actually doing some good. Quite a few of his other donations have come with massive strings attached: i.e. we'll buy large quantities of drugs for your country if you sign an IP protection treaty with the USA. The justification is that the drug companies won't sell the drugs for export to a country that doesn't respect US patents. The fact that the treaties also happen to include things that directly benefit some of BG's other investments is just a happy side effect...

I thought some surgeon came out and said that he had a highly treatable form or cancer but decided to do the alternative treatments first instead of the more scientifically based ones and it got worse.

Admittedly it's not completely clear-cut, but he didn't exactly do as much as he could have. Observe:

Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for mainstream medical intervention for nine months,[103] instead consuming a special alternative medicine diet in an attempt to thwart the disease. According to Harvard researcher Dr. Ramzi Amir, his choice of alternative treatment "led to an unnecessarily early death".[136] According to Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined."[139] "Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, before finally having surgery in July 2004."[140] He eventually underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure") in July 2004, that appeared to successfully remove the tumor.[141][142][143] Jobs apparently did not receive chemotherapy or radiation therapy.[137][144] During Jobs's absence, Tim Cook, head of worldwide sales and operations at Apple, ran the company.[137]

So sayeth Wikipedia. [wikipedia.org] The "flying to mysterious locations for exotic treatments" part did not work out so well.

This is crazy. I'm not saying it always makes sense, on a personal level, to go along with a doc's rec--I might choose not to have chemo if it involves going through living hell and I'm very likely to die anyway--but when you have cancer, you find the best surgeon in your part of the world (or go elsewhere if there are no good surgeons near you) and get the f'ing thing OUT of your body.

say what you will about bill gates and microsoft and windows, the truth is that in his post-microsoft life than nearly any other individual, and certainly more than his frenemy Steve Jobs. Talk about an ambitious agenda - cure malaria, cure aids. Big ideas that would literally help a billion people.

One of the key differences between Jobs and Gates is that Gates retired

Jobs and Gates were almost the exact same age... both born in 1955.

Jobs was too driven by his focus on Apple to think about philanthropy.

I expect that Jobs was too driven by his focus on Apple to think about retiring in the first place. And besides, what sort of excuse is being too focussed on his own company to think about helping others? If anything, it only shows a abysmally poor sense of priorities that are absolutely nobody's f

You (and the dork who modded by comment "troll") seem to be suffering the misconception that I was praising or justifying Jobs. I was just pointing out a difference in Jobs' and Gates' personalities and life choices, and how that led to one becoming a life-saving philanthropist and the other... not. Jobs clearly believed that what he was doing and planning to do with Apple was the best thing he could do to make the world a better place. I wasn't trying to evaluate whether he was right.

There's no reason to believe that. In fact all public evidence on Jobs thought process for Charitable giving say otherwise.

Jobs was a vicious, mean bastard, who treated pretty much everyone in his life like crap. He just happened to make great tech products. Btw I happen to own several of these products. Although now that I know as much as I do about him I guess I have to think about what that means.

There was some speculation that before he died he might have been giving anonymously. I call bullshit until p

More specifically, he knew good ways to monetize great tech products that other people made.

Wozniak built the Apple computer, not Jobs. Jobs' involvement was helping Woz create a company around it... not that this was any small role, but it did not mean that Jobs was good at making a great new tech products.

Since you seem to have completely missed my point, I'll clarify it: I don't think Jobs would have outlived his obsession with Apple even if he'd lived to be 90. Like I said: Gates retired; Jobs refused to. But hypothetically if he had ever decided he was done with Apple, I think there's a good chance he would have created a foundation which he would have micromanaged with the same level of obsession and intensity. Gates runs the Gates Foundation much the same way he ran Microsoft; Jobs would have run hi

Mr Gates,
I just need $10000. You spend that on car insurance every month. I could do so much with that money. You spend that on massages every month. I could do wonders that that money. You spend that on starbucks every month. It would be easy for you.

I'm sure if you had a real case to present him, you could get that money. Begging and saying "This money means nothing to you, you wouldn't miss it at all" to a person who knows the value of money doesn't sound very productive towards that goal.

Bill Gates could literally cure cancer, eradicate AIDS and make Malaria piss itself and people would still be giving him grief about Windows, IE6 or ripping off Apple.

I don't really think he's doing it to win. I also don't think he really gives a shit what people think about about the above mentioned 'sins'. If I had so much money that I could give three quarters of a BILLION dollars to charity and still have enough left over to pack a car completely full of $100 bills, I think it's far past the point of needing to prove myself to anybody.

I'm not suggesting that he does care, only that the animosity people feel towards Gates is ridiculous, particularly when you consider that he is one of the world's most prolific philanthropists.

Many men would move to Bali and sip cocktails or buy islands or build statues of themselves, but Gates has dedicated himself to doing what he can for those who need help the most. Fuck petty patent wars and crappy consumer electronics with a 12 month obsolescence cycle - Bill Gates is doing work that really matter

He would've won, if he hadn't been such a bastard for the first 45 years of his life (or at least from when he started coding school systems to put him into classes with more girls until he finally released most of his executive power from Microsoft).

at least from when he started coding school systems to put him into classes with more girls

That is more "fucking awsome" than "bastard", even if today it would get his ass raped in some federal prison.
I'd say coding a BASIC interpreter in 4kb using paper and an emulator you hacked up for an unreleased platform is pretty cool as well.
Then he started hearing calls from the dark side and the rest is History.

All in all, I think he is an admirable man if only in the same category as Genghis Khan - who also did a lot genetic health related work for Eurasian people.

I take your point; except I think the scale slides back to "fucking bastard" away from "fucking awesome" precisely because according to History, he heeded those calls from the Dark Side.
Just because you have mad skillz doesn't make you Good when you use your powers for evil.

It's unfortunate, but the Pope is way more wealthy than Bill Gates, and as long as he is sending hoards of priests/PR agents to Africa telling everyone "condoms spread AIDS", no amount of money Bill Gates spends is ever going improve things.

I hated Gates, but now that he is using his real monopoly money to do good things, I actually genuinely respect the guy. But I still despise Microsoft and it's crappy software. I would respect Bill Gates even more if he went back to Microsoft and said, "You

Man, with that kind of money you could probably fund almost all experiments currently running in the world.
I mean think about it, with the exception of large scale experiments like Tevatron or LHC, Bill Gates could fund almost the entire physics research currently active in the world.

I wonder why he is so focused on curing AIDS, when he could practically double the world research output in all other fields? It seems to me, that this could have much larger impact on a larger group of people.
I mean Afri

You have no heart at all. We should just let everyone who has these conditions die and focus on physics instead. Got it. I mean it's not like any first world countries have to deal with things like AIDS and TB.

The Gates Foundation is about making a real and immediate difference in people's lives - giving existing cures to existing people, not research scams. As a result it has likely saved more lives than any other charity effort in history. But feel free to start your own charity foundation if you'd like to do things differently.

Let's not forget that the reason developing countries can't cheaply manufacture their own AIDS medication is that the TRIPS agreement, which Gates was a major back of, requires them to respect the patents of the richest countries.

The development cost might justify the patent system for pharma in rich countries, but there are countries that have big AIDS problems and which are too poor for their populations to fund pharma development in any significant way. There the patent system for pharma isn't justified and is leading to millions of deaths. And that's what Gates pushed for via TRIPS.

And charity like this (in this case: a tiny portion of someone's ill-gotten gains) isn't making up the difference. Last I heard, the AIDS problems

Bill made software that got me stuck with his crappy product.
Windows (2003) and active directory do not offer nearly enough management knobs/tools/etc to straighten out even the simplest issues with active directory.
It doesn't show that sync stopped. (but it does beep on crashes of services, unstarted services, full disks, swap file, etc etc etc and do not forghet the windows updates that cream at ya to reboot again)
This overlooked corner makes windows unfit for the enterprise.
Now that Bill tries to do

In South Africa (Where a lot of these funds will be used) 30% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in 2010 were HIV+. A lot of those children will be HIV positive. Even more of them would have been if not for the treatments and funding from organizations like the AIDS fund.

In 2008, almost six hundred thousand people died from AIDS in South Africa (That's 1% of the population, by the way, _in a single year_). The year before that? The same. And the year before that? Also the same.

(I was in the first responder community in south africa many years ago, and the only statistic more scary than the HIV+ rate among people admitted to one very large hospital was it's corresponding Hepatitus B rate)

With that in mind, do you see why I find your flippant comment just a little annoying and condescending?

It may be easy to avoid in first world countries, but that's not always the case in third world countries. Lack of sanitary conditions in medical facilities, and lack of education can be major contributing factors. But what about transfer of HIV from mother to infant at birth? What about rape? What about a complete lack of publicly available HIV tests, so it's not known who is infected and who isn't?

HIV/AIDS is one of the worst and greatest things to happen to society. As a result of HIV we have pushed a lot of research into how viruses work and as a result we have come up with numerous anti-virals which are drugs that were non-existent 30 years ago. We have also discovered methods of using non-lethal viruses to infect abnormal cells with new DNA that fixes their abnormality. You're probably a troll but if not your ignorance of the subject is pretty clear.

Just saying. Everyone is handing-out condoms and Lysol, but Lyme Disease is worse. It's like having AIDS at random for a month and then it goes away long enough to forget but then returns to hit your harder each time.

AIDS only effects you slowly and gradualy and finally puts you down when you are old anyways, and Tuberculosis is something only people get when they can affort to fly in an Airplane or visit foreign countries. Americanse can't afford to get Tuberculosis, and the sloppy ones get AIDS, but Ly

A thousand children are born every day with HIV. There 2.5 million children with AIDS at the end of 2009. How easy was it for them to avoid it?

Your attitude isn't far wrong as a Western perspective, but the truth is AIDS is pretty rampant in other parts of the world (particularly Africa). Over there, culture & religion are huge roadblocks to stopping the spread, which means there is a great deal of 'collateral damage' to people who you'd think would be safe (children, spouses, etc.).

Whatever you think, 1.9 million people died in 2009 from AIDS, while 1.7 million died from tuberculosis. Not that tuberculosis isn't a fine target for money too, I just think its too facile to dismiss AIDS as 'easy to avoid' and therefore not worth pursuing.

You're not entirely wrong, but its always easy to say that about someone ELSE'S culture & religion:) All I was trying to say is that the perception we have of AIDS here -- that its caused by unprotected sex and/or dirty needle use -- isn't the same over there. My father's involved with an international charity that does a lot of work in Africa & Asia trying to reduce AIDS incidence, so I get to hear a lot about the problems they encounter. They're slowly winning, but there are a lot of factors that

It is going to TB, at least partly. TFA references "the troubled global AIDS fund," but it later goes on to explain that the actual name of the fund is The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (another important disease).

He didn't say that vaccines reduce population. He said that the sociological effects of a more healthy and wealthy population include reduced population growth. Due to a variety of factors this is true. I don't necessarily agree that population growth is in itself a negative thing we should be working towards reducing, but the context in which he mentioned it was as a downstream consequence of a healthy population that has escaped widespread poverty, not as a direct effect of the vaccinations.

Yes, and check out his more detailed explanations from other interviews:

GATES: Well, the most exciting thing I learned when I was just getting into philanthropy was that, if you reduce childhood deaths, if you improve health in a society, that, surprisingly, population growth goes down. And that's because a parent needs to have some children survive into adulthood to take care of them when they're old.

And so, if they think having six children is what they need to do to have at least two survive, that's what they'll do. And amazingly, across the entire world, as health improves, then the population growth actually is reduced.

And there's a miracle intervention, which is vaccines. In 1960, over 20 million children died. In 2005, less than 10 million died. And that's despite much larger global population.

That is huge progress. And a lot of that is because these vaccinations are being given broadly, over half of that improvement. Another part is from economic development.

And so, even in the poorest countries, we should go in and give them a malaria vaccine, and give them vaccines for diarrheal diseases. And if a mother wants to limit her family size, give her the tools that let her have that possibility.

So, I think we owe it even to the poorest billion to give them a chance.

That's not to say I agree with his population growth bit, or even that his apparently somewhat paradoxical reasoning works out if you run the numbers, but it seems that his motivation to improve people's lives is good, whether or not a larger anti-population-growth rationale makes any sense.

The world today has 6.8 billion people... that's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.

He wasn't talking about killing 10-15% through vaccines. He was suggesting that properly informed adults may consider the effect of popping out child after child which is what happens now. That instead of having 9 billion people, that it might be closer to ~7.6 billion instead. It's sad that I even need to explain this.

Civilization requires inequality. The wise should prosper, and fools should suffer - that is good and just and right. Enforced equality of outcomes is truly monstrous: it's the destruction of the human spirit, the reduction of man to animal.

And you sound like someone so superficial that they couldn't be bothered to think for more than 5 seconds beyond a rather dimwitted emotional response. Allowing for your impairments, I'll try to explain. What artificial intelligence gets us is an expanded domain space of practical, solvable problems. These solutions can be obtained more cheaply and quickly. It also expands the reach of non-human labor and analysis, to the point where we probably will have little need to send actual humans anywhere for space